Telecommunications services such as cellular communications are generally provided to customers via two methods, prepaid and postpaid. Prepaid customers typically purchase a number of voice minutes at a predetermined cost prior to receiving wireless voice service. After the predetermined number of voice minutes is exhausted the prepaid customer must replenish their account prior to receiving future service. Prepaid wireless service is popular among customers who are ineligible for a contract-based subscription service, such as customers with no or poor credit history, and young adults, among others.
Postpaid accounts are designed such that if the customer exceeds the number of voice minutes, data capacity, text messages, or other services available for their account, the postpaid customer will be charged for the excess services on a bill sent to the customer at the end of the billing cycle. Often times, the customer is unaware of the overage and is requested to pay an unexpected bill at the end of the billing cycle.
Services, such as Cingular's ROLLOVER® service aim to eliminate overages and accumulate unused minutes for use in future billing cycles. This service, however, does not allow for a user to add voice minutes on-the-fly and requires the subscriber to be using the service for at least one month to accumulate unused minutes.
Postpaid customers are set to a monthly reoccurring charge (MRC) that does not typically fluctuate from month to month. Accordingly, it is difficult for service providers to increase revenue from these customers outside of the occasional overage or purchase (e.g., ringtone).
Prepaid customers are often limited to pay-per-use voice and data for their prepaid service. Many prepaid customers are teenagers and young adults that are socially-active. Data services such as text messaging are widely popular among this demographic, however, a postpaid subscription service is not ideal or not obtainable for many of these customers. Other customers enjoy the ability to pay on an as-needed basis as opposed to being confined to a postpaid subscription service.
Thus, it would be beneficial for a postpaid customer to offer services to increase the allotment of a certain service (e.g., minutes/month) for a particular billing period on an as-needed basis. Also, the ability to offer free or pay trials for services could aid in introducing new features and services to customers. These on-the-fly services can increase revenue for the service provider from postpaid customers. Likewise, the ability to offer enhanced services to prepaid customers is also desirable to service providers.
Accordingly, what is needed is novel methods to provision wireline and wireless services and goods in real-time or near real-time for postpaid and prepaid subscribers, such as to provide additional services for prepaid customers and provide trial and on-the-fly availability of services for postpaid customers.